The 2004 film “It’s all gone Pete Tong” tells the fictional story of international superstar DJ Frankie Wilde. He is the number one DJ in the world, has a beautiful wife, incredible villa in Ibiza, a huge recording contract and … Frankie is going deaf.
There are almost no jobs you can do in the music industry (aside from tour bus driver) that don’t require good hearing. Weather it’s on stage, in a DJ booth or a recording studio, good hearing makes you more valuable to those who hire you. In my long career, I have been on countless stages and in an endless number of DJ booths. On many of them the music monitors were so loud that anyone with normal hearing would find it unbearable.
I once worked in a club where the DJ booth had a walkway behind it and was a common place to hang out when you were not spinning. Two of the DJs that spun there on a regular basis were notorious for loud booth monitors. Some nights it was so loud you couldn’t be with in 20 feet of the booth without some sort of ear protection. Not to mention the fact that you could stand in the middle of the dance floor and tell when they would turn the monitors on or off. That’s just messed up.
Permanent noise induced hearing loss occurs when hair cells in the inner ear called stereocilia are damaged. The hair cells vibrate and send impulses via the cochlear nerve to the brain. Certain pitches will resonate in a specific location while louder sounds will cause more hair cells to move. When the hair cells get over stimulated, they become paralyzed and stop responding. They will recover after a period of time without noise.
Repeated exposure to excessive noise will kill the hair cells and result in permanent hearing loss. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 48 million or 20 percent of Americans have some degree of hearing loss. That makes it a public health issue third in line after heart disease and arthritis.
The company Protection4Hearing in the UK breaks down sound exposure with a sliding scale. “If you’re listening to music at 85dB, your hearing is safe for eight hours. Then when it goes up by 3 dB, it cuts the safety time down by half.” So, if you consider that the average nightclub sound system is around 106 dB, the math tells you that your ears are safe in such an environment for around 4 minutes.“ “Anything over 100 dB-SPL for more than 15 minutes a day should be a serious concern. Short-term exposure to very loud levels (over 120 dB-SPL) can cause loss after very few periods of this abuse. Anything over 150 will cause permanent loss instantly (literally).”
Tinnitus is another result of prolonged exposure to loud noises. It comes from the Latin word tinnitus meaning “ringing”. Tinnitus is the medical term for “hearing” noises in your ears when there is no outside source of the sounds. The noises you hear can be soft or loud. They may sound like ringing, buzzing, hissing, or sizzling. Tinnitus is not a disease, but a condition that can result from a wide range of underlying causes. The most common cause is noise-induced hearing loss.
Tinnitus cannot be measured scientifically. It can be described, according to the difficulties it imposes, on a scale from “slight” to “catastrophic”. Fifty million people in the United States experience tinnitus to some degree. Of these, about 16 million have it severe enough to seek medical attention. Two million patients are so debilitated to a level that they cannot function on a “normal,” day-to-day basis.
With that info in hand what ways can someone who has to be around loud music for their income do to keep enjoying every note?
First off, start with the volume. Most club owners or managers would not encourage you to turn down the house system, but you can control the sound level in the booth. Give your ears a rest between mixes by turning down your headphones or booth monitor.
Second, sound quality is also a factor in hearing damage. A poorly tuned, or sub-par system can be just as damaging at a lower volume as a good system cranked. Use good headphones or in-ear monitors. If the sound quality in your headphones is poor, it may cause you to turn up the volume for mixing, subsequently causing damage.
Third is ear protection. I know most DJs don’t like “ear plugs” but I’m not talking about foam wads you shove in your ear. For under $20 a company called “Go Travel” makes ear plugs that don’t block the sound but filter it. Different types of earplugs can reduce the overall volume while other types filter out tones that are more damaging. Hearing loss can be from a onetime event or from many events over time. It is ultimately up to you how and when you choose to protect your ears, but it is something to consider. I have always said that I want to listen to music long after I quit playing it.
You may say “I don’t have the symptoms of hearing loss or Tinnitus”. That by no means says you haven’t already caused some level of irreversible damage. One thing your doctor will tell you is that by the time you notice it, it’s too late. If I can sum everything up in one quote from the movie “It’s all gone Pete Tong” is – “There’s not much you can do as a DJ if you can’t hear.”